Question

Our company requires that we keep track of time used for projects. In the past this has been tracked by each individual manually and then aggregated per project. After moving to Fogbugz I would prefer to use Fogbugz' time tracking features for this purpose if possible.

I was thinking of using schedule items in each project to which individuals could charge their time against such as "Test planning", "Regression testing", "Developing automated test cases", etc. This would seem to work nicely together with EBS since these are activities that require estimations, have dependencies and affect the project's schedule.

However, if I understand how the time tracking works in Fogbugz it would seem that I need to create one schedule item per person, per project. So that if there are 3 testers in a project then I would need the above items times 3. Is this correct?

Are there any better suggestions on how to achieve this?

If anyone else is using Fogbugz to track total time used towards a project I'd love to hear how you are doing it, what works and what doesn't. In this example I talk specifically about QA activities, but the same translates to similar development tasks.

Also, if using it in this way, how do you collect the aggregate information?

Answer 1

We also charge our cliens by time, this is how we do it:

WE create a case for every item and we add time to this by the working on menu.

For items like Planning and Testing that involve a lot of people Fogbugz let you add at the same time hours for diferents user, what does not work with this the EBS, but for billing is great.

Answer 2

This question on EBS buffer item best-practices should be updated soon